Preview: Dying For It

I’d been thinking of submitting the play that this is based on, The Suicide, by the Russian playwright Nikolai Erdman, but discovered that Moira Buffini had done an adaptation of it. It felt more accessible to a British audience than the original, because of the dryness of the humour. I love the richness of her characters – she never seems to create a role that doesn’t have something of value to say – and the way she constructs a play, so I decided to go with her version.

It looks at what makes a life worth living – is it because you are loved, or is a sense of worth and value more important? It also explores what happens when people are promised a dream – that of equality and freedom following the Russian Revolution – and then discover the reality is quite different. Most of the characters in the play are poor and deeply disillusioned and their actual hunger makes them quite desperate.

Nikolai Erdman’s original play was considered so critical of post-Revolutionary Russia that it was banned for many years and not performed in Russia until the perestroika era around 1990, although the RSC performed the first English-language adaptation in 1979.

It’s very funny as well as being quite profound (and potentially tragic), and the cast are doing a fantastic job of bringing this out. There are some very heightened characters who still need a sense of humanity. It’s actually all been fun, especially finding that a tiny tweak makes an already funny scene completely hysterical.

The challenges have been mainly to do with lots of instructions to lift and carry people as well as a selection of large, eccentric and tricky props which have involved some interesting travels. And our search for ‘beggar musicians’ to play at the party, despite several promising leads, came to nothing, so we have taken another route.

The main protagonists are Semyon (Jamie Bowman) an unemployed man, and his hardworking wife, Masha (Megan Sheerin). They rent a space (a hallway, not a room) in a run-down boarding house which they share with Serafima, Masha’s mother (Laura Morgan), Alexander, a fairground barker (Chris Bennett) and Yegor, a postman and card-carrying communist (Tirusanthan Thiruvilangam).

Patrons of the café run by Margarita (Ingrid Miller) include the poverty-stricken intellectual Aristarkh (Jack King), the romantic Kleopatra (Sagal Jama), Father Yelpidy, an alcoholic priest (David Frost), and Viktor, the self-styled ‘People’s Poet’ (Tom Watts). A pair of undertakers (Paolo Cucchi and Pavel Penev) visit in search of a body at one stage.

Profound, political, hilarious